Immediately following AMRAP, complete 50 push ups for time.Recently I made some changes in my training (some of you may remember this post) and I had a lightbulb moment around the changes a couple of days ago. I was coaching a deadlift workout, and as I was watching people bang out some pretty heavy lifts I started to get really excited about the idea of being strong. Being strong is a really good feeling!

I started thinking about my workouts and realized that because I said I was going to do more running, outdoor and gymnastic stuff, I had been resisting including weights in my programming. Like ACTIVELY saying “no” to including them in my workouts. Which is funny because all I really said was that I wanted to have FUN!

I started thinking about why strength training might not have occurred like fun. And then it hit me — I had been creating lifting programming for myself from the idea that I wasn’t strong enough! I was DOING the lifting to FIX a “problem” I thought I had. I was making it a REQUIREMENT every week that I cycle through some heavy lifts to make sure that I was increasing my strength numbers, when all along I actually was strong enough! Strong enough for what? Well, certainly for anything that I might need to do in my life! Because I was operating with “not strong enough” in the background, my strength training had an air of obligation to it. You know, you can kinda smell it but you don’t really know what it is.

The truth is I LOVE lifting heavy stuff. It feels good! So now I’m doing it, not because I’m trying to make linear progress, but because I love being strong. I wanna be strong! I love my programming now, I’m doing the gymnastics stuff I talked about and I’m getting outside and running and sprinting more. Now I’m throwing in some creative lifting workouts that don’t have anything to do with linear gains, but just doing the kind of thing I love — picking up heavy things!

It’s kind of fun putting all the pieces together. It doesn’t happen all at once. Shift things around, bring things in, push things out, bring some of the pushed out things back and streamline it all so there’s nothing extra. Everything there is something that I want there, and there’s nothing in there that doesn’t make a difference in what I’m up to.